An Easy-to-implement Construction for $(k,n)$-threshold Progressive Visual Secret Sharing Schemes

Abstract

Visual cryptography encrypts the secret image into $n$ shares (transparency) so that only stacking a qualified number of shares can recover the secret image by the human visual system while no information can be revealed without a large enough number of shares. This paper investigates the $(k,n)$-threshold Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) model, where one can decrypt the original image by stacking at least $k$ shares and get nothing with less than $k$ shares. There are two main approaches in the literature: codebook-based schemes and random-grid-based schemes; the former is the case of this paper. In general, given any positive integers $k$ and $n$, it is not easy to design a valid scheme for the $(k,n)$-threshold VSS model. In this paper, we propose a simple strategy to construct an efficient scheme for the $(k,n)$-threshold VSS model for any positive integers $2\leq k\leq n$. The crucial idea is to establish a seemingly unrelated connection between the $(k,n)$-threshold VSS scheme and a mathematical structure -- the generalized Pascal's triangle. This paper improves and extends previous results in four aspects: Our construction offers a unified viewpoint and covers several known results; The resulting scheme has a progressive-viewing property that means the more shares being stacked together the clearer the secret image would be revealed. The proposed scheme can be constructed explicitly and efficiently based on the generalized Pascal's triangle without a computer. Performance of the proposed scheme is comparable with known results.